 coming. Is that what you mentioned? Yes. Okay. Okay. And just one other thing I'll say is that we are having Margaret Wood, who is the project manager with the school, the new Fort River School, she will be joining and she'll be able to provide some information about the surfaces that they're considering for the playground. So she'll be with us. She just joined as a panelist, so I will move her once we get to that topic. Okay. And Susan and Ed are here too. And same thing. I'll move them once we get to that topic. Okay. Okay. So I guess I'll start. Oh, here's Lauren. I'll get her, let her get on. Hi, Lauren. Hi, Marie. How are you? Good. I think I'm just about to read the preamble and we'll get started. Okay. Board of Health. Okay. Pursuant to Chapter 20 of the Acts of 2021 and renewed by Governor Maura Healey, this meeting of the Board of Health will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so by following the instruction on the Board of Health posted agenda via Zoom. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access proceedings as soon as it is technologically possible. After this meeting, all approved Board of Health minutes are posted on our website once they are approved by the Board. I will now open the January 11th, 2024 Board of Health meeting at 5.32 p.m. with the roll call. Um, Risha? Here. Pramila? Here. Lauren? Here. Okay. And Maureen? Here. And we know that Tim is not able to be here. Um, okay. So our first agenda item is to review and receive the minutes of the December 14th, 2023 meeting. I understand everyone's had them to review. Did anyone have any corrections or or questions about the minutes? No. I have one thing that I wondered about. In the Director's Update, uh, Part A, there's new product, there's like about two-thirds of the way down that paragraph. There's a sentence that starts, new products are being marketed such as Delta 8, which is a curated cannabis product. And I actually think the better word for that is a synthetic cannabis product. I'm not sure what curated means. I think I did hear that word when we were discussing it, but I think it is, it's one of the natural cannabinoids, but it's not in not enough strength in the actual plant to really purify it without like a ton of of the actual plant. So all of it that's on the market is synthetic, essentially. So that would be one change that I would suggest. Okay. Yeah, I think I lifted that language from the industry. The industry refers to them as curated cannabis products. Well, I was, I looked online and there's a company called Curated Cannabis out of California, I think that's got sales things a lot of places. But yeah, it didn't seem to have a meaning that I could, I could find other than. Yeah, that word curated is very au courant right now. I think it is. It's a marketing thing. I think it is too. We can definitely change that. Okay. It does occur naturally in small quantities, but the product is, is synthetic as you're saying. So yeah, we can make that change. Okay. Any other questions or comments? Can we get a motion to approve the minutes? I'm going to accept the December 14, 2023 minutes. And can we get a second? It would have to be Lauren, right? Because Risha was there. Right. I saw her hand, but I didn't hear her voice. Because you muted. Yeah. Oh, there you go. Okay. Thank you. And we have a vote. Lauren? Yes. Pramila? Can you hear me? Yeah. Yes. And Maureen? Yes. So the minutes are accepted. Okay. That's done. So next section of the meeting is public comment. And we will allow public comment on agenda items with a limit of two minutes per person. And I expect that we might have some comments. We have a hand raised, Maria. I'm moving her to a panelist so she can speak. Hey, Maria. Oh, how are we now? Can we can hear you now? Awesome. Thank you. I didn't hit my unmute. So thank you for allowing me to speak. I'm here to talk about the playground surface. I was not the person that asked you to talk about this, although I'm glad that you are. And can I just briefly ask, did you guys get any of the materials that I sent? Was that shared out? Great. Thank you so much. Okay. So this is about the playground that's going to be at the new elementary school. And I'm very excited about this project. And I've been paying close attention to a lot of the outdoor stuff, particularly the playground surface that the committee had originally wanted to install as this rubber poured in place. And Turi has done an excellent job staying up to date on all of this, so the toxic use reduction institute. And from the materials that I sent you, you'll see that there are a number of different materials that can be used. I would have been advocating for something other than the rubber poured in place because of all of the concerns of the chemicals that are in there, the fact that it's made out of crumbed or shredded rubber tires. It has a host of concerns for the environments and the people that are using it, poly aromatic hydrocarbons, VOCs, heavy metals, phthalates, et cetera, and had been encouraging them to use either engineered wood fiber, which doesn't have these, or bonded wood fiber in places where they want a unitary surface. And then most recently, Turi has included cork poured in place. To give you, I'm not sure if you guys have been following this at the conservation commission, but they were, I sent the same thing to them, because they had to address this because they had to sign off on the first bit of documents that are going out for bid. And they were in agreement and really encouraged the committee to look for use one of the alternatives. And my understanding is that the OPM on the project and the designers are looking into that. They are meeting tomorrow to discuss this further. And the permitting from the concom was granted with the exception of the playground surfacing because that has not been decided. So I think your work tonight and or into the future, whatever you do with this, is going to be very helpful in assisting in making this decision. The information that you will have seen in the Turi report talks about how there's problems with increased temperature on these surfaces, then advising kids to wash their hands and not put anything down and eat it. So for a net zero project and a safety issue, and also not only for the humans using it, but the drainage into the Fort River, which runs right alongside it. For all these reasons, I really hope that you will acknowledge those risks and encourage the building committee to use either cork port in place, which avoids those or some other and some form of engineered wood fiber. I think that's it. I'm trying to summarize what I said to you in two minutes. I'm probably over. So I'll stop talking now. Thank you so much for your time. And thank you for the materials you shared. Thank you, sir. I'm not seeing any more hands raised. Okay. Okay, then we're going to start with old business. And I guess we brought this up in the last meeting, the idea that we might do some revisions on our tobacco sales regulations to help decrease youth tobacco use. Risha and I have been looking at this and Risha's I shared a link with Risha with a talk that was given through the Pioneer Valley, I think tobacco coalition, and that tobacco control coalition, and they offered in that talk to help people doing, changing their regulations. And Risha said, well, why don't we meet with them? And so Risha and I and Kiko were able to meet with Meredith O'Leary of Northampton, who's the Pioneer Valley Tobacco Control Collaborative, and Sarah McColgan, the Massachusetts Health Officers Association, and Cheryl Savara, who is a director of the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards, all three of whom are really familiar with these regulations. I've worked on them for decades. It was a very helpful meeting. So Risha and I decided that the first step would be to decide on the format. There is a template for these regulations that has existed and has been modified over the years. At least on the last revision, and that I think was approved in like 2020, Amherst decided to change the format somewhat, especially where in section five, concerning the actual regulations. There are lots of small changes that are to be discussed later. I guess I would ask if people have had a chance to look at this enough to decide this evening whether we would stick with our format, the Amherst format, or go back to the templates format. And I can just give you a bit of the reasoning. I think the change was to try to make it more understandable to permit holders and to make it clear the difference between the various types of tobacco retailers and what rules applied to them. Then the question came up of whether the fact that Amherst looked different makes it harder for the people who actually go and evaluate the permit holders when they go out to make sure that they're following the rules. Meredith told me they have a special checklist for the Amherst, so they can deal with that. If people feel like they need extra time to actually look at this in more detail before deciding, I think that would be okay. But if you've looked at it enough and you feel like this issue can be decided tonight, it would be good. And then we could go to the next step, which would be having, I think, with Sarah or Cheryl actually make the changes in our regulations then for us to discuss at a future date. So I guess, I think Risha's up on this as she was in that meeting and we had a chance to look at it in detail, but I'm not sure whether Prima or you, Lauren, are feeling comfortable with that yet. Well, I don't know what the original format was. I think you should have received the template and the current regulations. So clearly you haven't had a chance to look at that. No, I did definitely review the current regulations. Somehow I managed to miss that there was a template. There's the state one, which is the state template. It's not a template as in it's empty. It has content in it. And then there's Amherst and they're just different formats. The content isn't the detail right now. Yeah, I'm sorry. I've printed up everything and for some reason I don't have the state formula. So just to clarify also, Prima, this was a supplemental email. So Kyle had sent an email ahead of time and then on Monday of this week I sent an email out saying we forgot some things, including the tobacco regulations that we currently use and this model template, which has lots of highlighted fields in it. So it's got color in it on this template because they're pieces that are new and pieces that are in highlight because they're new to draw our attention to it. So you might have missed that second email. I remember seeing an email from you, Pico. But let me just look for it again and see. Yeah, so if you're finding a document that has highlighted, that would be the one, the thing that we're talking about. Go ahead, Lauren. Oh, sorry. Can you clarify what we would be voting on and is there any way to share the on the screen what was sent, the supplemental information that was sent? I think I'm not understanding. Okay. I found it. Just to let you know, go ahead. I don't know that I have it. I mean, I think that's something I can do. If that's something that is allowable and it feels easy, I can probably do that. My thought is if neither of you have had a chance to really look at it, that doing that in this meeting is not going to be the right place. I can put together something that explains this better and send it out to both of you and to Tim too, just to explain this question, this first step question. And it really isn't difficult. It's looking at section five where we actually spell out where we sell tobacco products and what the rules are for those different types of retailers. And you'll just see the same thing is in them, but the way it's described, the way it's separated is different. And the reasons to keep it and maybe reasons not, but that's kind of a first first step. I was just going to ask if the green and the yellow, what the green and the yellow highlights indicate, but I agree with Maureen and I apologize for not having looked at it. Somehow I missed it. I saw all the others, but I missed that. Yeah, it was a lot. And Lauren, you were trying to say something, but we couldn't hear you. Do you want to say it again? Oh, no, I was just saying that I thought that we were having a discussion right now. So I, you know, I'm not clear on what you are asking us to potentially vote on it. So if we look at it later, I just wanted to be clear on what we're supposed to do. So I think what might be contributing to the confusion is that we're using this word template, which actually doesn't appear in the title of any of these documents. So what we sent, what I sent on Monday, I sent some things related to the playground and I sent two documents related to tobacco. One of them is our current regulations, which reads regulation of the Amherst Board of Health. You've probably seen it before. It's on our website. The other thing that I sent was the 2023 model tobacco regulations from the Maureen reference that MAHB and MHOA have put together. So it's not so much a template because a template sounds like something that's blank that you put things into. It's a model regulation, but the format is different in terms of how it's laid out and the sections that are in it. And so what we wanted to vote on and make sense for people to think about it later is do we want to keep the same sort of organizing structure of our current document or do we want to use the organizing structure of this model? Because then it would be more in sync with what people in other municipalities are using and it's also I think a little bit more clear and intuitive. So that's the issue before us, but sounds like we're going to wait till people get a chance to really look at them to decide what we want to do. Okay. And I might in the process try to put that in words and send it out and so it's just a little clearer about what the question is. So you have something to reference. I think that's a great idea. I really admit that there was a lot of material that came your way for this meeting and in two separate emails. So it's not at all surprising that it was overload and somewhat confusing. So thank you for being able to clarify it Maureen. Okay. Can I just add in that maybe it would be helpful to have a bit of a sense of what happens after we make this vote? Yep. So the first vote is a fairly low stakes vote I think and it's on the format and the outline and the structure of the regulations. Do we keep ours? Do we match with the state? That feels fairly low stakes to me. Once that happens, the state body will put in their suggested changes. Some of these are very low stakes. It's updating a definition to match the federal definition or updating something to be clear about what the state regulations are and that we'd have to do no matter what. And then there's, you know, I don't know the number off the top of my head, but maybe five or six discussions, decisions that we need to make as a board as to whether we want to add, change, subtract something from our current ones. Hopefully we can do that at the next board meeting, but depends on what the agenda and how full it is. But that's where the actual content comes in. This is just a start so we know which one we're working with and then we go from there. Thank you. I appreciate that so much, Risha. Could I then ask a question, as long as we're sort of postponing discussion of this until the next meeting so that we have time to send out a clarifying email with the two documents to be compared, I wonder if we can try to do somewhat more in our next meeting besides, like you're saying, the low stakes thing is bold format or state format? Hopefully that won't be a super difficult thing to decide. And then can we begin in the next meeting to discuss some of these other things, or do we need to wait for any experts to come and join us or should we invite experts to come and join us next meeting? Just posing that question to the board. So there's two levels of decisions that have to be made on actual content. The first is to look at the edits that the state puts in, that the state helpers, it's not the state government, and decide if we accept them. And if there's any, again, I think most of them are fairly straightforward. Some of them we don't have flexibility about because it's just clarifying state law. But we do need to make sure we're all on board with all of the changes that they suggest. Then there's the bigger picture of things that they won't put in and is up to us if we want to put in takeout change. So we can't have that, we can't have them touch the document till we voted on which template we're using. So the edits we wouldn't be able to talk about, we could potentially talk about the bigger picture ones because they don't need to touch those. If people want to split it up in that way that we would talk about the bigger picture, and then we would have the full edits, that might actually make sense, have all the edits and you can review it once ideally. And actually, depending on how much we are going to need to discuss, we might break those down into the few categories that we have and do that over the course of time. But at least we can focus on a couple of substantial things in the next meeting. Yeah, so I'm happy to put together the topics to discuss and in my head, it's sort of like the voter's guide, like here's the pros and here's the cons to this. And then we come together and discuss and reflect. And I'll do likewise with the whole the format issue. And then Kiko, I think we should invite the experts in case we don't know enough to answer the question. Okay, again, if there's space on next month's agenda, depending on what else is going on. All right, we'll hold that under advisement then. Okay, sounds good. Okay, thank you, everyone. The next area is new business, the first item being body art fee structure, which I think we all received a copy of our current fees for the body art licenses or permits. And I think we have kind of generally discussed this in some other meetings, but what we need to do is set a fee for the guest license and for the apprentice license. So I know when we talked about it, there was a suggestion that we for the guest license that we which is up to 30 days, that we just simply divide the full license by 12 and come up with a number close to that, which comes out between 20 and $25. And I think we could choose either or something different if someone has another rationale. And for the apprentice, I was thinking of a lower fee. Our tattoo technician license is a $250 annual fee, same as piercing. And if someone does both types of body art, it's $325. So as an apprentice, I was thinking $100, maybe $50. I don't know. I know other towns around us have much lower fees, but I don't know the structure of the Amherst licensing maybe just different. And I was going to follow the current licensing fees. How long is the apprentice license for? It's a year and renewed annually. It sounds like you did a little research on other towns. Does it typically break down as a guest is 12, one-twelfth of? No. Here's Northampton. And I don't have others, but the apprentice license in Northampton is $50. But that's the same as the practitioner's license. And the temporary license is $25. And the establishment is $150 versus our establishment is $275. So it's a very different structure. And Kiko, Kyle, I have no idea if either of you know this, but do other licenses reflect that difference from surrounding towns? Is this one out of whack or is this an Amherst thing? It's a great question. I don't know the answer. I'm trying to think about what sort of analogous fees might be for us to compare, but I'm really struck by the difference. It's so much less expensive and surprising to me. I try reaching out to someone in the licensing division and I didn't get an answer. Because I don't know how they structure the how. I know we are the ones who set the fees, but is there a structure within the town that is it cost money for them to do the research to make sure people's licenses, documentation is consistent with what's required for the license? Or I just don't know if there's a thread that ties all the licensing fees together across the town or not? I'm seeing Ed raise his hand and the attendees maybe have some insight, so I will move them to a panelist right now. Thank you, Kyle. Ed, are you there? So we see Ed's cue, but we don't see Ed. I don't know what happened. I'll remove him and see if he raises his hand again. Okay. What happened? Okay. Honestly, if we do the structure that we spoke of, we're kind of in the ballpark of Northampton. It's just the existing license fees that are kind of out of whack. So I don't know if we want to decide on the new fees and then revisit the whole structure if we can get more information. Yeah. I was just doing some quick research and just looking at tobacco, which is not really analogous, but it's another license. And we charge 300 for a tobacco fee, I believe, and Northampton charges 250 for tobacco retailers. So maybe Amherst is a little more expensive, generally. It's not enough evidence to draw a conclusion, but it does seem like a very substantial difference for the body practitioners. So it's possible that Ed has some light to shed on this, but something happened with his connection. So it feels like we... The other thing that I'll say is that I did, when I was inquiring as to how we make adjustments to the fees, I asked, so do we ever adjust them downwards? And the answer that I got was no, not usually. We increase them, but we don't generally adjust them downwards. But this is sort of interesting to explore, given that it's such a large difference. Yeah. But does anyone... It's like Ed might be back. Let me re-attempt. Let's try. Hopefully fingers crossed. Hello. Oh, you're back. Can you hear me? Hi. Yes. I was only going to comment, and I hope I haven't slowed you down, that when I started 13 years ago, I worked in both Northampton and Amherst. And I don't think the fees in either town have changed, that there's been that disparity. Amherst always had higher fees, but we haven't raised them in the whole time I've been here. And it didn't seem to be a detriment. Hold on. I have a visitor. I'll be right back. Can you say that again? It didn't seem to be... Sure. Can you hear me well? Yes. Oh, okay. That when I started 13 years ago in Amherst and Northampton, because I split my time as a health inspector in both towns, there's always been that difference. Amherst fees were higher than neighboring towns, but in neither town have they changed in 13 years. I mean, so what you're seeing for current fees in Northampton and in Amherst were flexible, that's been there for years. Northampton's always had a number of tattoo shops, and Amherst, I think at most, I don't know if we've ever had two. We've always had at least one, maybe two. And that's across the board. Our fees have been larger, but they haven't been going up in any neighboring towns that I've seen. We seem to not be trying to make money on fees. Well, we were just commenting that the difference, we noticed that their Amherst fees were a little higher in other categories, but they're substantially higher for body art. I mean, five times higher from 50 to 250. Yeah. It's hard to say that a $50 fee covers the cost of issuing anything, so that doesn't mean we have to. Stephen McCarthy works the most across the board with all of our licensing, and he probably would be a good person to get an opinion about, you know, as far as why we set fees, where they do currently anyway. He's worked for the town for more than five years, I think now. Maureen, you're muted. You're still muted. I can't hear you anyway. Can anybody hear Maureen? Yeah, I guess. I didn't do that on purpose, but it was probably a good thing for my interruption. Are these new regulations go into effect in March? March 14? They're going to affect in March. Do we feel like we have time to get more information on this, or do we feel like we can set these new lower fees and pour the guest artists and the apprentice and let the rest, you know, just ride with it? Yeah, so Ed, what I had said before you joined is that I had heard that we don't ever adjust downwards our fees. So we're noticing this discrepancy, but it's not as if we're going to come and say, okay, we want to change the fees to $100 from $250. I don't think that's the purpose of this conversation, and it's not really within our scope to do that, but we do want to set some fees based on what we, you know, based on our current sort of structure for these part-time and apprentice people. So it feels like we should go ahead and do that based on what we're working from. Yeah, I agree. And what you suggested, Maureen, for the guest license to be 112th of the regular license seems reasonable. It just seems to me that the tattoo establishment might be waiting on, you know, information about the fees so that they can go ahead with the guest artist thing, which is what prompted all of this to begin with, right? So it seems to me that it's reasonable to decide on that piece now. Okay, I think so too. Any other thoughts about that? I'm just doing those sort of thoughts around incentives, right? Like what are we incentivizing by putting the prices where we put them? And I guess I would rather incentivize someone to get an annual license than 12 guest licenses in a year. That's not allowed, actually. There are limits. That's a limit of three. Okay. Then I won't worry about it as much. I was going to say like just our $2 less or something for the annual fee than 12 of those. I mean, obviously, the other bit that I'm thinking about is what it incentivizes versus neighboring towns. But if we're not sort of talking about the overall fee structure, then it's probably not as relevant. So yes, 112th sounds right. And remind me what your suggestion was on the apprentice. I thought like 50 or 100. I feel like those people aren't earning money there. At least in the beginning they are, I don't know how their relationship works with the actual trainers. But so I was thinking of setting that on the lowest side. And I thought, I think my original thought was $100. And then I also felt well as 50 reasonable. I personally would be fine with 25 for guest and 50 for apprentice, which is close to neighboring towns. Okay. Then there's the combo package. If your guest artist is a tattooer and a piercer is $325 annually. And that's between $25 and $30. So I was thinking $30 if they did that. Do we feel ready to put that in any other questions about that or thoughts? Do you want to put that into emotion and vote on this? I can try. I moved to have the guest license for body arts and tattoo to be set at $25 and the apprentice license for a year to be set at $50. Is that what you said? And thought about the combination. And then the combination could be $30. Well, I suppose I should put it a little more firmly that nation should be $30. Everybody got that? Can we just have a second? I'll second that. And to vote, Lauren? Yes. Premola? Yes. Risha? Yes. Maureen? Yes. And so we have a V structure. So now our next item is on the drinking well application. And I see Ed is with us. So we have an application from Alex Niefer for his family's property at 354 Henry Street. And I think you have been forwarded all of the application materials. I visited the site. In fact, I've been a number of times as a building inspector and as a health inspector on the property as the foundation has started to go in on the house that they're building there. We have a plan for the septic system that will be used and has been approved already, which is very relevant to the well location. It's I think 175 feet, which is well beyond the 100 foot requirement for the spacing between the well and the septic system. It's a property of 20 or 21 acres. So neighbors are quite removed from the property. There's no history of use that would be a potential pollution source. It's well cited, you know, in the topography it's not in a low spot or it's convenient for the driller to work on the property. So, you know, I in looking over the materials, the only thing that I was just noticing, and I think the board has brought this up in the past, is when we have attached to the application, the well driller certificate, which actually is for 2023. It was current at the time in December when the materials were submitted. And I just checked the well, the state's website, and they have not updated the list. So if you would be so inclined to approve the well application, it can be contingent on my confirming that he's renewed his license for this year. The company Connecticut Valley Artesian Wells, I think carries four licenses. This is Joe Dilk, senior, his son, and two others both hold licenses in the company. Thank you for checking that, because I was going to ask about that. Well, I think I remember the last time this came up. So I think I've noticed it the last time too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. Go ahead, Lauren. Oh, I can pictures. What is the orange stick is where the orange stick that was labeled? Yeah. So that's the location of the well. It's adjacent to that. It's not far from the red car that's in the pictures. That's where the drilling rig will back up to there and drill. And then the house water, you know, to be a connection that goes from there to the house, the water supply. I think they're typically four feet underground. Wanted to know where the well would be. I didn't understand that. I think someone mentioned that the conservation commission didn't have any concerns about this property. Yeah, we, before we even bring it to the Board of Health, we make sure that Erin Schock has had a chance to review and she's attached a note in the opening of permitting that says that I think that it's outside the conservation commission's jurisdiction, which means they have no wetland area that brings a concern to that sighting. So we won't bring them to you before Erin has signed off on it. Thank you. And the abutter, excuse me, the abutter notifications, if there was any feedback or comments they wanted to make, would that be communicated directly? It could be. They could be in the audience tonight. I don't know if there's anybody who has come specifically to listen to this part of the meeting and to, would have any comments? Yeah. Does anyone have any concerns about this particular well site? We're without our environmental scientists and hydrologists, but I think the clarity of the report suggests that this is well as perfectly within the reasonable site for the property and that the property is large enough to not have much concern about abutting properties. So the one curious thing is the shape of the property was entirely unusual and I just didn't know what that little like stiletto heel was of the property. It's actually, it's two adjacent parcels and I'm not sure why it was broken up that way. Okay. So maybe it was a like a front seat. It's essentially a flag line, I think, that connects down to Henry Street. At the, this was one of several parcels. The others have had a number of houses built along the road south of there along Henry Street. There's a group home, which I think is the next closest built on site. And then two or three single family dwellings. And then there's to the north of the flag lot connection to Henry Street. There is also a single family dwelling. It makes sense that there are to be two adjacent lots because they're now, they have front to two areas of frontage. Do we have a motion to approve the well for 354 Henry Street? I just wanted to ask, I thought I heard Lauren trying to ask a question or again and wanted to make sure all one resident, one house. So Lauren, you're not coming through very clearly. Lauren, I don't know if you can hear me. This is Kiko, but if you, yeah, it's really nice to see you, but you might want to turn your camera off just when you're talking because that might help with the bandwidth. And we could hear you more clearly because it's really hard to, it's coming through really choppy. See if that helps. Okay. I was just wondering if just for that one residential house. If the question was, is the well just for one house? It is. It's just to serve that one one house. The family is making a small farm on the property. They already are keeping some, some livestock on the property. So I'm sure it'll serve the barn, the livestock use. It's a three or four bedroom house. It's not, you know, overly large. It's a five person family, I believe. Good to know. Thank you. You're welcome. So I can make a motion to approve the application. If that's all I have to say, and I don't have to be more articulate than that. Maureen, you're muted again. Back around. Sorry. Do we have a second? I'll second the motion. Lauren, we have a vote. We'll take a vote. Lauren. I'm going to abstain. Maureen. Okay. Pamela? Yes. Risha? Yes. Maureen. Yes. So that's acceptance of the well proposal at 354 Henry Street. Thank you. And I will get another attachment of the current license. Right. And I guess we should have added that contingent on the active license. Great. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. So for our next item is playground surfacing. And this came up just historic history. I think Maria mentioned it as well that we received a request from a resident who wanted to just bring this for comment before the Board of Health regarding the safety issues, toxic chemicals, drainage, and other environmental issues. And thinking about it as similar to a previous action by the board with regard to the artificial turf field, we decided to put it on the agenda. We are not in about to make a regulation about any of the kind of materials that are involved. We are not in the deciding role in this project. But it seemed reasonable for us to try to learn about it and make some consideration and to decide if there's any reason for us to recommend for or against any of the particular proposals. I didn't know if we wanted to have Margaret speak first from the don't recall her title, but she is the project manager for the liaison to the company for the for this project and has a lot of knowledge about it. And we would benefit from hearing from her. I just moved her to a panelist. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thanks, Margaret, for joining us. Oh no, thank you. I think it's a great opportunity to talk about this. So thanks for making some time in your agenda. So let me give you a little background. So Maureen, I sometimes I struggle myself sometimes to explain my job, but the as some of you may know, the school project at Fort River, which is going to combine the school populations at Wildwood and at Fort River in a single building, which will be the first building built under the net, the Towns net zero bylaw, is getting is partially funding significantly funded by the mass school building authority, the MSBA. And then the MSBA system, and actually for any project that's over, I think $1.5 million of public money, municipalities are required to have what's called an owner's project manager. So it's a consulting role. Some communities have their own certified bonus project manager in this particular case and pretty commonly, you know, it is a role that is publicly procured. So I was the first consultant to join the team. So I've been working on that now for at least a year and a half. The company I work for, answer advisory, where we are doing a bunch of projects up and down the Pioneer Valley. So we're working in Polio, Chickpea, Springfield. This is a really great project. And the playground has, I think is going to be just fantastic. I want to be really clear. So I'm not the designer. There's a whole design team that is proposing the design. And at the time this came up, and that Maria emailed the committee, well came to a committee meeting and brought up with just a couple of weeks ago, the design team was pretty deep in the weeds on completing the 60% construction documents, which we're in the process of estimating. So that's actually kind of in the rear view mirror. But I was asked because they were really busy to initiate this research on behalf of the building committee. So here is what I learned in a nutshell. I have written, I wrote an email last Friday that was shared with the Conservation Commission. And although we didn't really talk about this in detail last night when we were at the ComCom meeting, I think it would be helpful to share it with you. So I'll tell you what's in it. So this material, this corkine, it's really interesting. It's an offshoot of the port wine business in Portugal. It started in Portugal. So you're making corks. You have leftover material, like rubber tires, except healthier. They're taking this material and they're putting it into a material that's binding it together and using it to make a playground surface. If it's convenient in a minute, I'll pull up a couple of pictures of it. It is beautiful, especially if you'd like natural finishes. I've had a lot of conversations now with the US representative of the companies. The company is based in Portugal. They have been using it in playgrounds in Europe since about 2016. So even in Europe, this is quite new to the market. I don't know. You all may not realize, but the design and construction industry is very slow to embrace new products because there's risk associated with them. But the material's been installed in a lot of playgrounds in Europe, including in Norway and Sweden, which could be considered kind of comparable climates to New England. But it's only been available in the United States since 2022 and it's not been installed anywhere in New England. So Amherst, the building committee, may embrace us and decide to be the first. What I have learned about it in terms of material installations in the US is it's actually being used in the US, for instance, it's actually been used quite a bit in Texas. And interestingly, one of the critiques of port and place rubber is that it gets hot. And the most recent playgrounds that have used port and place rubber, I visited one in Easton recently, where they've obviously made a big attempt to color the port and place rubber very light colors. So that's relative to the heat issue. So the corkine, because it's very light color, has a lower temperature and that has made it popular in a couple of districts in Texas that are in the process of renovating playgrounds or building new playgrounds. So the only place in New England that stuff has been installed is in, there's about, I would say maybe 200 square feet of it, maybe not even that much, that was installed last year on a playground in Carlisle called the Castle Playground, which I visited last week. It appears that playground is mostly woodchips playground, but they put it right at the entrance to the site around a tree. And I think it was a combination of wanting to make an accessible entrance and wanting to protect the tree roots. That was my take looking at it. I have a couple of pictures, they're not great, but you know, imagine you're sort of entering a playground, there's a big tree right in front of you. It's poured in a circular path right around it. It looks fine. The biggest installation on the East Coast, and it's a big one, is it was in Philadelphia. So Philadelphia is renovating the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park. It's actually a beautiful master plan if you go online for this, you know, very major, very sustainably focused playground renovation. And that in last year, they installed about 24,000 square feet of this material, which is going through its first winter. And I am hoping to get down there soon to take a look at it. So it's super new. So what does that mean to Amherst? So I would say there's a couple of risk factors for it. So one is that, you know, typical poured-in-place rubber warranties, as I understand them, are about five years. But anecdotally, the stuff often lasts longer. Not consistent. You know, Maria mentioned she'd gone down to Springfield and seen her in the recent installation. I mean, I think it's really probably about the quality of the installation. So some of them last, some of them don't. You have some playgrounds in Amherst that have poured-in-place rubber. And I've heard, again, anecdotally, they're holding up well. But there's just more of a track record. The landscape architect commented in an email that they don't typically, you know, what's tied up here is their liability. So if they specify something that doesn't last, if, you know, they have some responsibility. So my assumption here is that they are saying, you know, this is, we can't absorb the liability for all of the liability for this. If Amherst wants to go ahead and do this, which that may be exactly where this goes. You know, the town is going to have less ability to rely on the liability of the designers because the designers would not choose this. It's because it's more risky in terms of its durability. The other risk that has to be taken into consideration, and again, I'm not saying in stating these things that I'm recommending against this, I'm just stating that there are risks associated with products. In one case, it's about it's being new to the market. The second risk is about its flexibility. So we know from the material that we've been provided that a lot of the popularity of port and place rubber is because it's very, it has a lot of resilience, measurable resilience. And the corkine is resilient, but does not appear to be as resilient. So it's a matter of degree, right? And this is about, this is really about broken bones, concussions. So a kid is on a playground equipment, they fall off and hurt themselves, you know, that these materials have been embraced, including wood chips have been embraced because of their, because they're providing resilience to a kid falling. The third risk, and again, not saying anybody shouldn't do this, but the third risk, which is really hard to get a handle on is cost. So this is, I think it would be safe to call this, I wouldn't say this is a salesman, I actually might, it's a hot product, right? It just came onto the market. It's addressing, I mean, I don't think port and place rubber is, that industry, you know, needs to kind of think hard about, you know, how they can make a cleaner, better product. But the reason that people traditionally turn to and recommend it is that it's predictable that there's lots of choices. Here, the way corkine is approaching, delivering the product in the market is they have what's called a brand master system, which means they're licensing the material to a company in a region. Now the good thing about a system like that is that it provides quality control, you know, the kind of quality control that I think can result in very different kinds of installations for rubber, right? So now you're basically saying we, they're saying we will give you a warranty because we are going to have someone that we know and trust installing it, which is great. The problem is it's a proprietary material, right? There's nothing else on the market that you can sort of procure comparatively, which is its own issue, right? But you can imagine if you're specifying a proprietary material, you don't have as much control over what you're likely to pay for it. And the related piece is that that installer is a regional, they can't, they don't let the installers bid against each other. So you have one installer, which is a company that's based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And, and I'm sure it did the installation and fill this big installation in Philadelphia. And you're speccing a proprietary product. So I don't have firm numbers and I probably can't get firm numbers. We've been carrying the material, this is probably more than you wanted to know, but I, you know, in the interest of sort of explaining what the building committee has to think about, we've been carrying in the current estimate, we have $25 a square foot for the porn place rubber material. So, you know, this is like everything that's underneath this stuff is the same, right? So we're talking about porn place rubber material on top of the substrate versus corkine. The only person I've found locally who has bid on this material, which is a contractor who is, who is going to be doing an installation in Easton, the spring recommended using $26 to $32 a square foot as a bid price. So this is a guy who it's a contractor who has had to go to the Louisiana company and make a contract with them for this material. So if you do the math on the area of this playground, it's that somewhere between a $15,000 to $100 plus $1,000 difference in cost for the corkine. And I will tell you, honestly, I don't think in five years the prices are going to look like that. I think this product is going to become more available and it has a lot of things to recommend it. But they're, they're in all likelihood there is a cost associated with it. And that's something that the building committee is going to have to take up tomorrow and talk about. So, you know, I think everything else you've heard about this, I don't fundamentally disagree with any of the points that Maria has made. I think that this, from a health perspective, from a, let me say, from the concoms perspective, I think, you know, in terms of the putting something in an area and not having any, not having to have the same concerns about groundwater contamination, for instance. I mean, I think this material does look better. But again, I'm not the person specifying it. I'm not the person buying it. And I'm not the person managing a school where the material is installed. And, you know, who has kids in a playground. So all of those pieces are going to have to be part of the discussion. So I will shut up now and ask folks have questions. I think we, well, from my perspective, we're more focused on the health issues with rubber port in place. And in addition to the core product that you're discussing, there are other options, right? The engineered wood fiber and so on. So I guess, I mean, it sounds like those are the only two options that are open in terms of the school playground. But in fact, there are others. Is the committee not considering those? So I'll pull something up. So the committee, the committee did consider those and actually had several meetings about them. And I will say that, you know, the choice that was before us, before Maria brought this material to our attention was the choice for all comparable projects. I actually called the MSBA to ask if they had this come ever come up on a project and they hadn't. So again, this is a super new issue because there's a super new product. The decision that the committee debated several times, the engineered wood fiber versus the use of port in place rubber, and they actually did take a vote on it. I'm going to pull up something that I did for them just to share. But in a nutshell, it's the challenge of engineered wood fiber or let's call it wood chips. I mean, engineered wood fiber is a kind of sort of more high end version of port in place rubber tends to come down first and foremost to cost. So it's a lot cheaper. I mean, there's no question. But the challenges of it, the big challenges of it, are accessibility. Although if you have someone tending to it all the time, conceptually it is accessible. But that most people who are in wheelchairs will not agree about that. And that's the reason that the Massachusetts Architectural Access Board has drafted guidelines, which they haven't yet sort of voted into. They're not currently regulations. They're draft regulations. But in those regulations, they would limit the use of engineered wood fiber because it's tough to move wheelchairs and other accessible kinds of other devices that you provide accessibility around on the material. So that's an issue. The other big issue is that when it is kind of installed to the required depth and is maintained that way, it should be as resilient as the port in place rubber. But the reality is, and I think we've all seen this on playgrounds, it gets scraped up. It gets moved. It doesn't stay where you put it. And the more active a spot is, the more the material moves around. So that puts a really high premium on being able to maintain the material perfectly, which I think is not an easy thing. I mean, I've never seen it maintained perfectly. And then I think the third piece is that it tends to get dirty. Critters like it. Dogs like it. It's not that clean. And again, I'm not saying that I think port in place rubber is, it's got its own problems, right? But when the committee sort of took off that comparison between the engineered wood fiber and the port in place rubber, understanding the concerns about port in place rubber, they really came down on the side of the accessibility and the need to have something that did not have an undue impact on the, the, you know, relatively small number of people the district has to maintain the playgrounds. So again, they've taken it up three separate times. And most recently, at the same meeting that Maria came to and raised the corkine, they took a vote on this. So I don't see the committee going back there on that issue. But I'm happy to share the summary that I made that I that I provided for that meeting for discussion. And you should also consider looking at the meeting minutes, which document the dialogue. I see Lauren has her hand up. Yes. I just have a few questions. Hello. Hi. The beginning of your explanation or introduction, you mentioned the corkine. Is that something that you guys are considering? Oh, yes. No, very much so. I mean, that that was the reason that that I, you know, I did this, the research on this material, the cork material. I think everybody's digging into it now and looking at the history, the recent, very recent history of it. And, you know, we understand that it, I mean, it looks like a great option. It just as I mentioned in my kind of dissertation, it has some risks associated with it, because it's really new to the market in the, particularly in the US. I mean, again, yeah, you know, usually see, let me just look at what the landscape architects said. I thought it was a really sort of great summary of of the landscape architect has commented, they do not typically specify new materials until they have been installed for at least five years, with a minimum of 10 installations. Right. And that's just you want to give a client something that's proven, right. This, this will be, you know, if Amherst embraces this and does this, you will have people coming from all over the place to come and look at it, because there's nowhere else in New England that this material exists. I mean, arguably, I was just Eastern will have a playground in the spring with the material on it, but it won't have gone through very many mentors in the New England climate. I'm sorry, Lauren, I just off the top of my head, because I do have children that are in elementary, middle and high school. And I, I agree that the board, I mean, we're, we're supposed to be looking at safety and we don't really like deal with, you know, the budget and, but I think working is the, the most expensive material and article that we were given to look over. It says that with all all materials, there's different, you know, things that the weather does to it, there's more, you know, issues that come up. There's you know, like you said, how, how to replace it. And so I just, I'm not really sure what, what the board, you know, would be considering as far as like just more information or good to know information. But I think for me, there's, there's more pressing issues and also whatever is decided safety and hopefully, you know, cost is, is a consideration. Yeah, I mean, this is exactly, Lauren, I, this is exactly the issues that the building committee has to grapple with. So. Right. And on that note, if I could offer, so Lauren, what you said is right on, which is that really the board's charge is to issue some guidance, advisory statement about the health impacts of potential choices for playground surfaces. So we're not, as you said, Maureen, the board can't really think about how much it's going to cost or, you know, how much the longevity so much, but really just of the available options of which Corkeen is now one that we've heard a little bit about knowing that it's really brand new. What are, what do we want to say as a board? What does the board want to say about the kinds of surfaces that it can't recommend because of health concerns? It doesn't sound like Corkeen is a surface that the board wouldn't recommend because it seems to be like doesn't have health issues, but some of the other ones like the crumb rumber or even the port in place do have concerns. So that's, I think the statement that we want to try to develop as a board without concern for how much it's going to cost and that sort of thing. And the the Turing materials, you know, are pretty compelling in terms of the port in place robber. And, and my assumption was that is what we were being asked to comment on, you know, that choice. And then it would be up to the committee to go with other choices. You know, if, if it's decided, well, I mean, we only make a recommendation, right? So my assumption is we're focusing on the port in place rubber, because that's what was decided. Is that correct? I mean, again, the history of this is we've had port in place rubber in the project since last January. So for a year, that's what's been carried in the, in the project. And so the project has gone through. In a year ago, we were finalizing what's called the schematic design, which is the basis of the, the funding agreement with the MSBA. And the design team has continued to develop the project with the port in place rubber. And so, you know, this issue was, was brought up in public comments starting a month or two ago. And the, as I said, the building committee had, I believe three had on the agenda three different times. Most recently, took a vote between port in place rubber and the engineered wood fiber in favor of staying with port in place rubber, which is again, the architects have been doing their work, right? I mean, it's, it's, we're only about five months from going to bid with this. So, you know, the issue got raised, everybody's looking seriously into the corkeen has to debate, you know, all the issues that I raised earlier, but it, it isn't, I just want to say it's not, this isn't like something that so it came up suddenly, right? I mean, it's, it's been part. So, you know, I think the, the committee voted early on to, on the playground design that was based on the port in place rubber and now has kind of cycled back to talk through engineered wood fiber and said no to engineered wood fiber. So now the discussion is between port in place rubber and the possibility of substituting corkeen. I have a couple of questions. I'd like to ask, you know, I've looked at a lot of things in the last week, but clearly, you know, I'm no expert on playground services in that period of time. Nor am I. But I have a couple of questions. I wondered if you knew the answers to one of the things that came up was the idea of bonded wood chips, basically the engineered wood products. It's mentioned, but I couldn't find anything more specific about it. And does anybody actually, have you ever seen anyone use it? Or have you had, do you know anything about it? No, no, because that sounded like, okay, that's been around for a while and now you're putting it in a bonded situation that might help with the accessibility and keeping things in place. But it seems like only a theoretical option. The other thing I wondered, you know, when the renovation of the athletic field came up and putting in a turf field as opposed to continue with natural grass, I think I felt that the combination of the PFAS products in chemicals into the grass, fake the artificial grass and the loose crumb rubber in the substrate really convinced me to make a recommendation against that. I read in one article and I couldn't really find it in the references that the bonded crumb rubber, which goes underneath the surface of the port-in-place surface, is less likely to leach chemicals because it's coated and bonded together with, I guess, a polyurethane. And the surface rubber is not from tires, it's a new rubber with fewer extraneous toxins in it that aren't from the tires. And again, it's bonded. And I just didn't know if that idea that things don't leach as easily from those products is true. Well, I mean, it makes sense to me. It does make sense, but I couldn't find any data on it. So I just wondered. Maybe let's worried about it then when I was thinking about just the crumb rubber issue. Yeah. While you were talking, Maureen, I did just look. Can I share my screen? Do I have the ability to do that? So I did just quickly look. This is what I see online for a kind of bonded engineered wood fiber. And we haven't looked at this material, and we probably should. You can see what they've done. They've taken the stuff and they've kind of chunked it together. And what's underneath? Can you tell? Let me look here. Yeah. It's interesting. It's the same. What I see right away is kind of the same concern we ran into before. If you start to look at this. So there's the impact rating. Here's the compliance, you know, which is what engineered wood fiber says, which is it's compliant, you know, with proper installation and maintenance, which makes me think this stuff probably does move around a little bit. I don't, I honestly don't know anything else about this. So I haven't even, you know, I don't want to suggest this, but I can see that the product exists in the mark. And, you know, I want to just say that you have to remember that from a liability perspective, most communities, and we understand that Amherst is different, most communities are most focused on the liability issue around falls, which is why the port and place rubber is so possible. It's performance on that issue is there is no comparison on the market. Okay. So you all have some different drivers here, which are, are your, the community's sort of goals and aspirations. So I think this needs to be approached differently. But just remember that that's the perspective of those who are specifying the corn place rubber. Honestly, I guess I've been thinking about this a lot. And I think that our responsibility is to think about health in every way. And that includes the primary reason for these products is, is the falls and injuries. And, and he issues, you know, but the injuries that could occur. It's also the accessibility because all children disabled children, parents or caregivers of children need to be able to get onto the surface. And that's kind of a physical and mental health concern. And then like the environmental concern is another health concern, but it's not our own only health concern in my mind. And so that, that made me think about how difficult this decision is for the, or the committee, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, again, I think that if you're interested in seeing the dialogue, it's recorded in the meeting minutes and I'm in the recordings. And it's been seriously discussed and debated. And the committee represents a very broad range of viewpoints about this. I just wanted to add to that, with like the Crocker farm playground, there's different materials in different places, like under the swings, there's the rubber, I think, and other places that there's wood. So maybe you could have a combination or I don't know, but that's another thing to consider. Totally agree. Is the, so this is Risha, is the piped in on any of the playgrounds in town at this point? The port and place rubber. Yes, thank you. Yes. Well, I could remember the acronym. Yeah. There is. And I cannot remember the names, but I think the most recent playground is what I heard has. It's at Groth Park. Groth Park. It's a pretty big, it's a sizeable chunk of PIB there. Yeah. Okay. Just wanted to check that was my, that was my understanding of what that was. But yeah, yeah, that's that's it. And I mean, again, you know, I, like I said, I went to see this playground in Easton and the colors were eye popping, but they're all really light colors, right? Because people are recognizing the heat issue with the dark colors and compensating for it that way. So I guess, Maureen, my question to you and the board is, you know, whether, I mean, obviously this is complicated. There are some things that are really clear, like crumb rubber in and of itself is something that I think the Board of Health wouldn't recommend. I mean, based on your conversations with me, Maureen, as a surface, it's not being considered for this particular project. But but it's possible that based on cost, you could go back to port and place rubber as an option. Would the board want to make a statement that port and place rubber is not something that they would advise be used? Do we need to spend more time thinking about it? So those are kind of my my questions to you. What can we do in this meeting today, based on the information that we have? Well, can I, can I just make the comment? So the the concom meeting last night was very helpful in the sense that, and this is just to sort of frame your conversation, the the project is being procured, you know, purchased in the public market in two stages. So the first stage, and I think you all are probably aware that the the Fort River site, I think used to be a swamp, you know, it's got terrible soil for building on and you know, has had a long history of being very wet. So in order to make sure that the new the new building doesn't have water issues, that the site doesn't have water issues, there's a lot of pre-work that has to be done. So stripping topsoil, doing what's called preloading the site, which is putting a big pile of dirt on the existing soils to compress them, putting in what are called ramdaggregate here. So so and then so that that piece of the work, the early site package, is out to bid right now. The building project, which the playground material will be embedded in, that project is not going out to bid, that that part of the bidding is not going to be advertised until the summer. Okay, so I think we've actually got quite, the building committee's got quite a bit more work to do. And we're meeting tomorrow. So I mean, I would personally, I would give yourself some time, what concom did was they kind of divided as we made a request that they kind of divide their consideration into, which is to say, they approved the order of conditions for the early site package, which is great for the team because then we get to give it to the contractors who are bidding. And they put off until we came back to them their commentary on the playground material. So we need to go back to them. We need to go go to the building committee and come to a conclusion. We need to go back to concom with what is recommended for their commentary. And you know, which all of which is to say, I don't, I think if you all need some more time to think about this, I want you to feel like you have that time. Thank you for that, Margaret. And I see Lauren has her hand up. But before we go to you, Lauren, I just wanted to say to Maria, I see you have your hand up also. But unfortunately, we're not able to take public comment at this white part of the meeting. We're only allowed to do that at the beginning when you had your couple of minutes time. So just to let you know that that's why we're not calling on you. So go ahead, Lauren. Oh, can I, can I say? Yeah. Okay. I almost forgot what I was going to say. But I didn't read as well in the article that was sent to us that certain materials need a level of feet for drainage or for drainage. So maybe that's something too that should be considered. But yeah, that's all I wanted to share. Okay. So Margaret, if I may ask, does that mean then because you were suggesting that we have more time, that the building committee can hold on making a decision until we make a recommendation? Well, so the building committee is meeting approximately monthly. So we're meeting tomorrow. And, you know, certainly if you have a message that you want me to take back to the building committee for tomorrow's meeting, that's fine. I think our next meeting is February, it's the 12th. No, it's probably the 16th. Yes, it's the 16th. It's the week before the holiday or the school vacation. So, you know, I think the the design team really does need to know what they're doing. So I mean, my recommendation to the building committee is going to be that we need to make a decision. They need to make a decision by then. But I think if you're, if you had input that you wanted to provide for that meeting, for them to consider, that would be a good time to provide it. Not the meeting tomorrow, you mean? Well, again, I'm just, this is a lot to take in. And if you want to debate it tonight and come to a decision, do so. But I'm just telling you that I don't think the committee is going to decide this tomorrow. Well, no, I appreciate knowing that. That's that's what I was asking. We don't have a vote scheduled. To be honest, I feel like we still, the team, including the design team, who if directed by the town to use corkeen, have to really sort of, you know, figure that out. There's some wheels that have to turn here before that decision would be final. I was just checking our next meeting is on February 8th. So it's probably before that other meeting. I think our position is perhaps just, I'm not quite sure. It's just to make a recommend not to necessarily say use this, but to say maybe something more general. And again, it might be just reinforcing kind of what they're already trying to do is to try and look at options that are meet all of the safety issues of the project from balls and accessibility to, you know, I guess I think about the disposal end of these products, you know, both the leaching and then the where they go afterwards, you know, the kind of whole lifespan of the project is to try to consider natural materials, all the options for natural materials that would be suitable prior to making a decision. I feel like, I mean, I think that's where I might come down. People might have stronger feelings about against the port-in-place product. But if I had to say something today, I think that's what I would say. So I just want to, I want to make the comment that, and this was, you know, really the nugget of the conversation that the committee had is there is no one product that is the best for everything. That's right. So if you went to DAC and with, you know, the disability advisory group, right, DAC would have one priority. CONCOM might have another priority. I mean, there isn't a perfect product. May there at some future date be a perfect product? And may it be quarkine? I mean, you know, it's just the reason we even have these discussions is there's no perfect product. You have to decide what your priority is. Exactly. Yeah. Actually, even all of the places I looked in terms of the environment, my environmental, like Tori said, there is no perfect product. The access board that discusses accessible playgrounds and materials, there's no perfect product. Because even, even the port-in-place rubber, if you get divots that can or are separations along seams or, you know, other things that get in, that they become inaccessible, can become inaccessible. All of these things require constant observation and repair and repositioning. None quite as much as, I guess, the engineered wood fibers. I think they are great. They sound, I thought, oh, that's perfect. But then when you read about it and how much effort in a daily way that it takes to keep it accessible and safe, it limits the use. Well, it limits the use and it introduces liability because it is really hard to keep it in the condition that is ideal and provides that protection. I see Risha has her hand up. Yeah, I just want to throw two thoughts in the mix. I don't actually, you know, have a have a feeling that I could make a statement of recommendation or not against anything. But so I went to Fort River. I grew up there. I lived around the corner. I got very sick from being in the school. The mold issue is real. It really is a swamp land. And so I wanted to flag that the ones that, particularly the woodchips, that have mold risks really raised my eyebrows and thinking about that site in particular. Yeah. I just want to flag that any of the things with mold should probably be taken pretty seriously in that site. And then the other thing that I know far less about, but that, you know, factors into my decision is around, you know, watershed or water contamination. It really is not far from the Fort River itself. And so those would be the two, you know, beyond the other things that are well documented risks on all of the different fabrics or materials. I think that those would be the two things I would add into my consideration set. Yeah. Well, Anna, you know, I will say, I mean, just Maureen to give an example, one of the things that they treat engineered wood fiber with to prevent mold is arsenic. Right. Well, I guess you have to get the type that is not is arsenic free. It doesn't have the pressure treated wood in it. But again, there's no perfect perfect. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. If there was a perfect product, we wouldn't need to spend the time. But God bless you all for wanting to spend the time this evening. And I hope you'll let me know if you have any questions, I'll send to Hiko the memo that I wrote for Con Con, as well as the memo that I wrote for the building committee, which, you know, made an attempt as a, as not from a design perspective, but just as a sort of looking at the big picture to sort of look at the, you know, how that these two, the port and place rubber versus the engineered wood fiber kind of weighed against each other. So it looks like Pramila has her hand up. Excuse me. Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, I don't feel like I have enough information now in terms of making a recommendation. I think I probably would want to hear from Turi directly at the National Center for Health Research, if that's possible. You know, in terms of I realize I realized from looking at the materials that there isn't a perfect product, but we have to weigh all these different health risks, right? And then it seems to me that's our charge, or we've been asked to make a recommendation, whether that's taken into account or not. So I feel like we need more information. At least I need more information. So I think I heard that from a couple of people. It sounds like that's where we're headed, Maureen, not to be issuing a statement today. Not pursuing any kind of statement at this point. I don't know how, if we can approach Turi to kind of give us more of them what they have in their hand, the guidelines for playgrounds, or if it becomes too site-specific for that to take place in a general discussion, I just don't know the answer to that of other sources of information. Yeah, I don't either. I mean, I contacted them in the hopes of getting them to come and talk to the committee, and I never got a response. But if you can, I think that would be great. We can try. I can look into that, Maureen. I know that the Turi report that I sent out in my original email was pretty comprehensive, but I can see if someone can come speak to the board maybe if we have more site-related questions. Thanks, Kyle. And I think for us to look at maybe what happened at the conservation commission meeting, I wasn't tuned into that in terms of the specifics of that. And maybe they can answer some of the questions that I had about how much leaching comes out of those bottom-bonded products. Kyle, what other site-related questions do you have? Does the board have? I personally don't. I was just thinking if the board had more questions that were outside of the purview of the report that I sent out. I think it might be digging into the details of some of their statements, I guess. Yeah. Because they did kind of qualify. If you're going to get poured in place, Robert, you should really talk with the provider and to really know what's in that specific product because they're not all the same products. And so that was part of what caught my eye a little bit. Right. Well, and again, the dilemma here. So if you go with poured in place, Robert, you're back in the competitive marketplace. You know you're getting because of the way it's bid. You know that you're getting the best price that you can get for the product. But what's in it goes back to the specification that is provided by the designer. So that's where your quality control comes from. It's not like, oh, we think we're going to work with so-and-so. Let's get together with them and tell them what we do and do not want. It's a specification that's publicly bid. And it's the design team that you're looking for to for the quality. I mean, with specific elements in each layer and the specific bonding. That's all described in the specifications. It has to be because otherwise people are bidding on apples and oranges. So what we didn't know about playground surfaces. And we're afraid to ask. Well, we appreciate your time, Margaret. We took a big chunk of your evening. So thank you for joining us. Absolutely. And happy new year. And thank you for paying attention. It's important. And if you have any other questions, let me know. Okay, we'll be in touch. Thank you. Okay. Take care. Bye-bye. Oh, we'll do a little more homework. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kyle and I will debrief about this. And we'll see. It's nice that Turi is at least local. You know, they're not that far from us. So maybe there would be interest in them coming to a meeting. We'll see. It would be nice to hear from them. I appreciate Margaret talking to us. I certainly learned a lot. But also she has to think about things that we don't. Right. Yeah. That are not our priority necessarily, right, in terms of health. So it seems to me would be helpful to hear from maybe even Con Con, you know. Yeah. Okay. So should we move to the director's update? Sure. And I'll be brief because I know that we're over time. But just that, you know, it's winter time, finally feeling like winter. And definitely, there's a sizable burden of respiratory illness out there. You know, just getting updates nationally. There's a lot of sickness, flu, COVID, RSV. In terms of locally, we do look at our wastewater reports to get a sense for infection levels. It's not definitive. It's really sort of more of a qualitative measure. You know, we don't have a number of COVID cases because we're not reporting those any longer. Most people are testing at home positive tests aren't being reported to the health department. But we did have a pretty sizable spike in the wastewater right after the holidays. It kind of tripled. And then it came right back down. So it's now at lower levels than it was, you know, in mid December and way lower than our last peak in October. So I know there are people nationally who are kind of bracing for a wave. But locally, we've peaked already, it seems. Maybe it'll build back up again. But we're just doing our best here to educate people about how to be safe with respiratory illness in general. I think it's great that mask wearing is sort of more normalized now. So whether it's a cold or the flu or whatever, if you've got respiratory symptoms, stay home, wear a mask if you have to be around folks. And we're still giving out COVID tests. We're running low on our supply. So it's been very popular. But just trying to keep people apprised, you know, there's nothing dire, urgent. It's sort of something that we're living with. But there are things that we can do to keep people as healthy as possible. So we're just keeping the word out about that. Our vaccine rate is not so great in Amherst, according to the state data that Department of Public Health publishes on the Respiratory Illness dashboard. It's at about 25%, which is not great. I think nation that's that's who people not full not people who've ever gotten a vaccine, but folks who've been vaccinated with the most recent vaccine, it's only about one or people. So that's and that's a trend across the country. Only one in five folks has gotten the booster. So we're doing another clinic at Meadowview Apartments. We're promoting it pretty heavily. It's on January 18th in the afternoon from two to four. We are offering that to people who live at Meadowview and in the surrounding areas. But we're also promoting it to survival center, you know, other agents, entities where folks who live in those apartments might be. We don't care if people who don't live in those apartments show up. We'll see anybody who comes. We are asking people to register ahead of time. That may or may not happen. But we're doing this in collaboration with City of Northampton and we're hoping we're trying to bring the vaccine to people rather than having people come to us and see how that goes. So we can report back on the success of that at the next meeting. Other collaborations, we are working closely with the Masante clinic. We're really building our relationship with them and also with Craig's Doors to do a hepatitis, some hepatitis A outreach, hepatitis A and B doing a vaccine clinic in collaboration with Masante at Craig's Doors. That's maybe one or two of their sites because they have the church and then they also have the Econolodge sort of housing in Hadley. So we're exploring doing some outreach to folks and being able to offer the vaccine to people who are insured because we can't vaccinate people who are insured, only uninsured or underinsured or uninsured. Our vaccine that we have at the health department can only be used for those groups. So people have mass health, which we found out today. A lot of folks at Craig's Doors do have mass health. We couldn't use our vaccine supply. So that's why we're collaborating with Masante and they've been terrific to work with so far. So we're really excited about that growing partnership. Yeah. And then I've talked with Lauren a little bit about this, but really wanting to do an intervention around mental wellness. And particularly with youth, but I think sort of generally for the community. So we're planning, I'm working with the recreation department on planning a series. We talked with someone today about one module in the series on a training methodology called QPR, which is a suicide prevention methodology that people can learn. Stands for question, persuade, refer. I had some issues with persuade. It sounded a little coercive to me, but we had a great conversation with a trainer and it actually sounds like it could be a very good training. But there are a lot of other things that we want to do in addition. That's just one piece. We want it to be broader. So we're thinking about that as being an important focus for us for the next year. I think those are my main updates that were on the agenda. I wanted to remind folks to connect with Kyle about signing the body art regulations. I know a few of you have done that. I don't know that everybody has. We're trying to get those signed. And when we do update the tobacco regulations, we'll have a really clear process for getting those signed as soon as we get them finalized because it's nice to be able to post them once they're finalized, especially for tobacco, because that'll be a big chunk of work that we'll be happy to get finished and get publicized. So did you have a question, Maureen? What did you mean? Did you mean the body art? Yeah. I meant, I'm saying that for body art regulations, we finalized them some time ago and we didn't have like, I think the best practice would be to get them signed within a week of finalizing and we're outside that. So when it comes to something more kind of publicly maybe interesting like tobacco regulations, let's definitely get them signed within a week. My mind lifted off a little bit. Yeah, that's okay. I might not have been extra clear in my conclusion. The last thing I wanted to say is just in support of our colleagues in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office, there are a lot of events coming up for Black History Month in February and also in January, there's a Martin Luther King Junior event on MLK Day next Monday here at the Bank Center at 1 p.m. And then there's the National Day of Racial Healing is the 16th of January, so the following day, next Tuesday. And there's an event at Crocker Farm Elementary School at 6 p.m., which is about bringing people together just to build community and, you know, dismantle racism by fostering cross relationships among people with lots of different backgrounds. So I really encourage folks to, there are all the information on the web about that, you know, to show up and to promote those events to your friends and neighbors. I think that's it for me and this folks have questions. I just have one quick comment. I read something today that might help open people's mind to another COVID vaccine is with each vaccine that you get, the risk of long COVID decreases. If you've had one, you decrease your risk by 20%. If you had three or more, you decrease your risk by 75%. So that might, I don't know if, you know, why do I need another one? There's a reason. That's good information. I hadn't seen that. Do you, can you do remember where you read that? Yeah, I'll send it. Thank you. I will send it. That would be great. That was just, I think I just saw it today. So anyway, thank you everybody. I believe that was in the your local epidemiology. It is. Yeah, I love that. I read that in today's report. Yeah, that's a great resource. So thank you. I'm not aware of that resource. Can you say it again? It's YLE, your local epidemiologist and it's an epidemiologist from California, I think, or Texas somewhere else, but it's a blog essentially and you can sign up to get that as an, those posts as an email. I think it's a sub-stack. Yeah, I'll forward you. It's somebody, yeah. It's Lena. It's the last name. Yeah, Caitlyn Jettelina. She's a consultant by day, a mom, and then, you know, she writes these, these blogs at night. I don't know how she has time for all of it. I don't know how she does either. It's a free service, but you can sign up to pay for it to support her if you want to. So, but yeah, she's great. She just frames the issues and really sane and like helpful ways. Can I just ask a question? Kyle, I had sent you an email about connecting, about signing the body art regulations and about meeting this morning, but I didn't hear back. So, I assume you couldn't do that. Did you not? I sent you an email, I think, a little bit after that, just asking for a specific time and then your address, but I feel free that I can swing by tomorrow morning on my way to the office. I'll send that to you then. Thank you. Sounds good. Thanks. No worries. Thanks for the follow-up. Are we, are we all set? I think so. Can we get a motion to adjourn the meeting? Motion to adjourn. Second? Second. Vote? Lauren? Yes. Misha? Yes. Pamela? Yes. Boreen? Yes. All right. Thank you guys for another epic. We'll see you next time. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye. Have a good night.